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Another ocean test scene! In this instance my aim was, to test out using adding velocity to the H12.5 ocean setup, as by default only an initial velocity is created and as a result the ocean calms down quite quickly. I also wanted to have a look at procedurally generating and texturing the surrounding terrain. Click through to see pretty pictures and a breakdown of what I learned along the way.

Houdini allows you to specify an external editor to use when editing VEX code (such as from the point wrangle SOP). By default, on OSX, the external app is the basic text editor, which is pretty barebones and had a tendency to crash. A far better solution would be to use the pretty sweet Textmate 2 editor, which you can download free from here. Setting Houdini to use Textmate is a relatively straightforward process:

Firstly, in Textmate, go to Preferences > Terminal and check that Shell Support turned on.

Next edit your hconfig.env file. This is located in the following directory (replacing the X.X with your Houdini version):

~/Library/Preferences/houdini/X.X/houdini.env

Then simply append the following text to the file:

VISUAL = /usr/local/bin/mate -w

When you next launch Houdini and edit VEX code it should now get sent over to Textmate for editing.

I’ve started to upload some assets and other bits and pieces to git hub. This serves both as a backup, but also a place to put assets that aren’t really suitable for the Orbolt store. Mostly they just do little things, but I’ve found them useful now and then and hope you might too.

The files still need to be organised a bit, and some of the assets are lacking documentation at the moment, but you can check out the repo here.

Introduction

Updated my wetmap asset which is in the Orbolt store. The new version adds a fair few features, and a bit of clean up. The basic features of the asset are that you can:

Create a point cloud for static, animated and deforming geometry.

This point cloud can then be used in a shading context to distinguish between wet and dry areas of an object.

Alternatively the point cloud can be baked to a texture map using the objects uvs.

This new version adds support for deforming and animated geometry as well as the afore mentioned baking to texture. Along with updated asset is a new example file which shows how to use the asset to create the paint in the scene below:

Well Houdini 12.5 was released last month, and, although it’s a point release it brings with it many impressive new features from a cloud and ocean tools to Open VDB support as well as a plethora of improvements. This is a brief overview of some of the new shiny that I’ve had time to play with so far.